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Kubuntu 8.04.1 on Dell Latitude D630

My new work laptop finally got to me. After some work, I’ve finally got a Linux installation running on it. First, I will detail the laptop and then my reasons for choices and formatting schemes.

Dell Latitude D630

The laptop is a Dell Latitude D630. The laptop follows in the tough construction of the recent Latitude series of laptops. Further, the look continues from the D620 with black beveling and gray highlights.

I decided to install a 64-bit version of the Kubuntu distribution variant of Ubuntu found at http://www.kubuntu.org/. I had traditionally used a 32-bit version of Linux in order to keep difficulties low. I felt that Linux might now be mature enough for 64-bit versions of a distribution to be strong.

Another reason for my examination of Kubuntu was the overall ease of hardware detection. My Intel Pro Wireless 3945 ABG NIC was flawlessly detected and “modeprobe -l | grep iwl3945” reveals that the iwl3945 module is loaded and not an ndiswrapper. Further, the nVidia card was easily detected and the required software was downloaded with little fanfare.

I used GParted to partition my hard disk. I left approximately 35 GB of the formatted 111 GB for the current Windows XP installation. I set aside 4 GB for a swap which enables me to use the hibernate feature if so desired, 20 GB for the / partition (containing everything but /home), and 50 GB for /home.

I gave a quick ‘sudo apt-get install firefox’, followed by similar commands for pidgin, and Mozilla Thunderbird. I did not download the bulk of updates required to bring Hardy Heron to full speed. I waited until this morning, at work, to download the updates while on campus allowing me to take advantage of a much faster network connection.

Conclusion

Surprisingly enough, the updated (‘sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’) Kubuntu still uses a 2.6.24 kernel (2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Fri Jul 11 21:01:46 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux, to be exact as ‘uname -a’ tells). I’m sure this has to do with the fact that the x86_64 kernels are probably slightly behind their 32-bit brothers.

Regardless, the laptop works well with this version of Kubuntu. If you haven’t been convinced to convert your laptop to using Linux, you should. Ubuntu is probably the place to start.

You’re partially correct. The original Centrino chipset came with the Pentium M processor which was a 32-bit processor. However, examine this article. According to that site, this is definitely a 64-bit processor. Reading the mobile processor brief on this site also explains pretty clear that this chip has a 64-bit architecture.Thanks,Jon